I have had a brief look over the internet, looking for a few details on what bikes Team GB were riding at the Olympics and could only get very vague details and a few mentions of a team of crack aerodynamicists and carbon composites engineers that go jokingly under the name 'Secret Squirrel club'. My primary interest was the bike that was ridden in both the road race and the time trial (as it was the same bike). I had a look at a few photos and the design doesnt look to be that spectacular with exposed brakes, alloy dropouts and cables flapping about in the wind near the top tube where on any other top market TT bike are routed straight into the top tube by some extraordinairy means like that can be seen on the likes of the Trek speed concept. So if anyone knows anything, please post it here!

They are astonishingly expensive though, it was mentioned during one of the Olympic events that it's about £20,000 for the track bike. Basically they are just offered for sale to meet the UCI's rules, not for any commercial reason.

Boardman - "I could have signed off on the creation of a set of concealed brake forks, this would impact on 1-2 medals however it would have been at the expense of making the new track cranks which would impact more on performance and effect 8 medals, so we compromised."

The "Secret Squirrel Club" did quite a lot of testing at a wind-tunnel facility where I was working, so expect they know the difference between marketing BS and going fast on a bike. Exposed cables or not, Brad took huge chunks out of time on the Olympic TT with those guys on their chi-chi kit.

Boardman - "I could have signed off on the creation of a set of concealed brake forks, this would impact on 1-2 medals however it would have been at the expense of making the new track cranks which would impact more on performance and effect 8 medals, so we compromised."

I did like Boardmans statement about the priorities. I'm sure that we'll never know, but I'd be curious as to how much difference the new track cranks made and whether the 'impact' was apparent. Would the 8 track medals have altered without the new track crank design and would new concealed brakes made any difference to the time trial?

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